Reason and Instinct. 5571 



have passed undestroyed through many and great revolutions of the 

 matter appropriated to us : the inference, therefore, is rather that that 

 great revolution which we call Death will not be fatal to the living 

 agents ourselves. 



III. That if we consider our bodies as made up of organs and 

 instruments of perception and motion, we shall be brought to the same 

 conclusion. We have no reason to think our organs of sense, — the 

 eye or ear, for instance, — in themselves percipients, but'only instru- 

 ments of our receiving appropriate ideas from external objects, and 

 that in much the same sort of sense as telescopes or acoustic tubes, 

 which are no part of the body at all : an impression confirmed by 

 instances of persons losing some of their organs of sense, the living- 

 beings themselves, their former occupants, remaining unimpaired by 

 the loss. It is also confirmed by the experience of dreams. And as 

 regards our power of moving or directing motion by will and choice, 

 it remains unlessened by the loss of a limb or of all our limbs; and 

 there is no appearance of our limbs being endued with a power of 

 moving or directing themselves. 



" Upon the whole, then, our organs of sense and our limbs are 

 certainly instruments which the living persons ourselves make use of 

 to perceive and move with ; there is not any probability that they 

 are any more; nor consequently that we have any other kind of rela- 

 tion to them than what we may have to any other foreign matter 

 formed into instruments of perception and motion, suppose into a 

 microscope or a staff (I say any other kind of relation, for I am not 

 speaking of the degree of it) ; nor consequently is there any pro- 

 bability that the alienation or dissolution of these instruments is the 

 destruction of the perceiving and moving agent. 



" And thus our finding that the dissolution of matter in which living- 

 beings were most nearly interested is not their dissolution, and that 

 the destruction of several of the organs and instruments of perception 

 and of motion belonging to them is not their destruction, shows 

 demonstratively that there is no ground to think that the dissolution 

 of any other matter, or destruction of any other organs and instru- 

 ments, will be the dissolution or destruction of living agents, from the 

 like kind of relation. And we have no reason to think we stand in any 

 other kind of relation to anything which we find dissolved by death. 



" But it is said these observations are equally applicable to brutes : 

 and it is thought an insuperable difficulty that they should be im- 

 mortal and by consequence capable of everlasting happiness. Now 

 this manner of expression is both invidious and weak ; but the thing 



